Twelve years ago, the dot-com bubble hadn’t yet burst, Amazon.com was just
three years old, and China was known for Mao, not for manufacturing.

What will the world be like 12 years from now?

Each year, a group of students at New York University’s famous Interactive
Telecommunications Program presents scenarios on the future of media. These
are fascinating glimpses of the interrelated future of new media and the
global economy; and then a thought-provoking, freeform discussion follows.

We’ll be talking about these four ways that the world might evolve by 2022:

? Firewalls: Democracy dies not with a bang, but with a twitter.
(Insular media and rivalry among superpowers combine to change our
conception of information flow, security, and public discourse on the
internet and elsewhere.)

? A New Knowledge Ecology: The structure of institutions, starting with
schools, is decoupled.
(Bureaucracies in any field, struggling to manage order, cannot hold their
lead against the new open institutions enabled by new media but maybe not
in ways that people expect.)

? The 21st Century City-State: The power and influence of the nation
devolves to local metropolitan areas.
With the price of oil rising, an explosion in fabrication technology, and
increasing migration to urban areas, the nation-state is fragmenting, and
people look locally and globally for their identity.

? Becoming Superhuman: The greatest plausible expansion of real-time
information and augmentation.
Information technology is no longer found primarily behind the screen.
People make more informed decisions about the physical world, and it makes
more informed decisions about them.